Identity Thieves Hijack Cellphone Accounts to Go After Virtual Currency
Weeks lost his phone number and about a million dollars’ worth of virtual currency late last year, despite having asked
his mobile phone provider for additional security after his wife and parents lost control of their phone numbers.
After a first wave of phone porting attacks on the virtual currency community last winter, which was reported
by Forbes, their frequency appears to have ticked up, Mr. Perklin and other security experts said.
“It’s really highlighting the insecurity of using any kind of telephone-based security,” said Michael Perklin, the chief information
security officer at the virtual currency exchange ShapeShift, which has seen many of its employees and customers attacked.
Danny Yang, the founder of the virtual currency security firm BlockSeer, said he had traced several attacks to internet
addresses in the Philippines, though other attacks have been tracked to computers in Turkey and the United States.
In a growing number of online attacks, hackers have been calling up Verizon, T-Mobile U. S., Sprint
and AT&T and asking them to transfer control of a victim’s phone number to a device under the control of the hackers.
Mr. Perklin and other people who have investigated recent hacks said the assailants generally succeeded by delivering sob stories about an emergency
that required the phone number to be moved to a new device — and by trying multiple times until a gullible agent was found.